Tomorrow starts our mock technical interviews and the students at Tech Elevator are frightened. As a .NET student, I will be with Java Tom (the other teacher) for my interview. He will talk with me a bit about technology and what I like about it, ask me some terms, and then give me a problem or two to work out with a marker and a whiteboard.
The thing is, writing code on a whiteboard is very different than what we have been doing every day for the last two months. For one thing, someone is sitting there watching you. That’s unnerving. For another, we have almost no practice writing these things by hand, everything has been through a keyboard. But the biggest hurdle to overcome is the lack of IntelliSense.
Visual Studio is the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that we work in. I believe it to be one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity. And I’m not kidding. I actually got in an argument with David whether the creation of Visual Studio is more impressive than sending a man to the moon. I think it might be.
Visual Studio makes coding possible for non-geniuses. At least that’s how I see it. And it makes everyone way, way faster than they would be without it. More accurate, too. The way that Visual Studio does this is through a code completion tool called IntelliSense. If you write the name of a variable and then enter a period, a long drop-down list of everything you can do to that variable becomes visible and clickable. Usually with just one or two letters, IntelliSense divines your intentions and serves up your code on a digital platter.
There is no IntelliSense on a whiteboard. We will write the name of our variables followed by a dot and then we will stare into the snowy abyss waiting for the answer to emerge from our own minds instead of from the depths of the .NET Framework. It’ll be a challenge.
But, believe it or not, it’s a challenge that I look forward to. A group of the .NETTERS convened in the green conference room early this morning and gave each other whiteboard quizzes. We did all right. According to the Toms, it’s all about how you talk and present yourself. If you miss the problem (and most do) but talk about it well, displaying logical thinking, then it went well.
That’s a bar that I think I can surpass.
From Retail to Programming 